Argentinian Telephone Workers Settle Accounts with Peronism

If there’s one thing which has characterised the Argentinian bourgeoisie, it’s the capacity to do anything necessary to maintain its own class rule. From 1930, it professed to be enforcing a corporative regime, but in order to adapt to the needs of the international market, and the new techniques of production, it hasn’t hesitated to alternate the use of dictatorships and democratic forms of rule; subordinating the working class to one sector or another of the dominant class.

Peronism, which served to implant capital’s real domination – to which stalinism, social-democracy and trotskism also contributed – merely created false expectations in the Argentinian working class. Peronism’s first government served to lead the working class into the defeat of 1955, and to bring about the loss of its union organisations to state control. Peronism is a counter-revolutionary movement whose only objective is the maintenance of society in such a way that the proletariat cannot become independant as a class.

In a process that began in 1973, the working class tended to break the Peronist expression of bourgeois nationalism; but this process was interrupted by the defeat of 24 March 1976 and the dictatorship, maintained until 1983. With the fall of fascism, many sectors of the working class sought an alternative in “radicalism”, which had veered left and seemed to be another road towards social conquests. After the failure of “radicalism”,the proletarians who’d turned to it, now in agreement on its class nature, returned to the fold of Peronism and gave their votes back to this movement in 1987.

As to the Menem-Duhalde government, it is an expression of the most highly concentrated sectors of the national economy most closely tied to the world market. Its highest interest is to have the greatest production of surplus value, and it aims to achieve with a plan to speed up the centralization of Argentinian national capital and its integration with world capitalism: hence it total agreement with the IMF and the World Bank, and with the present US government, Great Britain etc. etc.

The IMF recognises that the Menem government has given it more than it could have expected.

Not only does their project tend to the subordination of the working class, but the aim is to destroy any idea it may have of revealing itself as such, as a class. From this premise is born the necessity, not only of making the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) subordinate to its interests, but of placing it officially at the command of the national presidency. For their plan to work, which aims at bringing about the defeat of the workers in all their struggles, capital requires the complicity of the union leadership.

Episodes in the class struggle at this point in the life of Argentinian society show that we’re still in the fascist phase of capitalism. When telephone workers went on strike, after the minister of labour failed to honour an agreement, the management began sacking the strikers and replacing them with members of the armed forces. Suddenly the union decided to suspend the strike and make a deal with the government – the latter would then negotiate from a position of strength, counting on the complicity of the union leadership.

However, the Menem goverment’s intention is nevertheless to defeat the telephone union since the latter has adopted positions distinct from those of the clique now in power i.e., it has resuscitated the old nationalist and anti-imperialist banners of Peronist demagogy, something which is troublesome in the current process of modernization of the capitalist accumulation. In these negotiations, the telephone workers lost, not just because of the union leadership, but also due to the positions of the so-called “left-wing” parties, and in particular of trotskism, which set about restoring social democracy, and washing away the sins of stalinism: it called for struggle for “Socialism in democracy”; spreading the theory that the revolution can only pass through the election of deputies and members of parliamnent.

In the middle of the present strike, left-wing forces are notable by their absence, and limited to ostentacious displays of democratic cretinism; they talk about and engage in everything – except the class struggle. All this, by not centralising the proletariat’s struggle, will lead to defeat. Confronted by this situation, what is needed is the rise of genuine, orthodox revolutionary communism, with all its theoretical and practical intransigence. We will continue to uphold our historical position: “The question of force is initially a question of reconstruction of revolutionary theory, then of the communist party without frontiers”.

Changes of Scenery in Argentina

It is always difficult for the democrats or Peronists to mask Capital’s dictatorship in Argentina.

At dawn on the 3^rd December 1990, an Argentine army unit known as the “carapintadas” (the painted faces) occupied various barracks and the offices of the army general staff.

Despite the fact that one of the insurgents, commenting on the events in a press interview, was astonished at the lack of popular support for the uprising, not so the poor and labouring classes, who are clearly well-aware on which side the declared fascists stand. They are the same people who, from 1975-1983, attacked the workers’ struggles and destroyed their most combative organizations by armed force. That much is obvious to the working class, despite its lack of the political organisation which would direct its present misery and sufferings towards the revolutionary perspective.

What no-one says to the proletariat, is that parties and units like those of the “carapintadas”, and the nationalist Workers’ Party are always kept in a state of readiness by all bourgeois governments in case they need to repress the subjected classes by military means, without getting their own hands dirty in the process. Fascism is just the armed wing, the illegal emergency squad of democracy. This explains and justifies President Menem’s recent pardon of the officials of the past fascist government, who were only carrying out the orders of the dominant class. Even the Carapintadas have benefitted from the pardon – although this is the fourth time they’ve rebelled! On the other hand, they say, they’d have been covered in glory during the “irredentist” war far the Falkland Islands.

Since 1927, the Argentinian bourgeoisie has continued to alternate the three forms of government: the social-democratic type of Alfonsin, Menem’s Peronist- corporative type, and the military type. From 1945, even the unions leadership have been co-opted into the government. Proletarians shouldn’t support any of the three forms. Rather, they must combat all three in equal measure, as they’re three heads on the same Hydra of capitalism.